Article published In:
Pragmatics and Society: Online-First Articles

Talking about the deceased in the Jish linguaculture

A semantic and pragmatic analysis

ORCID logo | Tel-Hai College
This paper has aimed to look into the terms and expressions used in the Jish linguaculture when talking about the deceased. Seventeen such terms and expressions are presented, discussed, and explicated using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach. The explications appear in simple, (semi-)universal language, which makes them relatively easily understood and readily translatable into any language. This, in turn, means that the explications are accessible by linguacultural insiders and outsiders. In addition, the study provides anthropologists and linguists with precise analysis owing to its micro-level focus; it investigates the micro-linguaculture of Jish, which belongs to the macro-culture of the Arab world. Lastly, the study documents one aspect of this undocumented linguaculture; this documentation can preserve one part of this linguaculture from fading into oblivion.
Keywords: Linguaculture, deceased, euphemistic terms, dysphemistic terms, jocular terms, interjectional phrases, NSM
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Methodology
  • 3.Talking about someone’s death in the Jish linguaculture
    • 3.1Different ways of saying “someone died”
    • 3.2Different ways of saying “someone was buried”
    • 3.3Different ways of referring to the deceased
      • 3.3.1ḥayāt ‘life’ & Il-ḥarīʾ ‘the burned’
      • 3.3.2 alla yirḥamu ‘may God have mercy on him’
      • 3.3.3 yirḥam il-trāb illi lammu ‘may [God] have mercy on the soil that engulfed him’
      • 3.3.4 alla yghammiʾlu ‘may God make it deeper for him’
  • 4.Discussion
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 8 March 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.23034.hab
References (36)
References
Al-Kharabshesh, Aladdin. 2011. “Arabic Death Discourse in Translation: Euphemism and Metaphorical Conceptualization in Jordanian Obituaries.” Across Languages and Cultures 12 (1): 19–48. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ameka, Felix. 2006. “‘When I Die, Don’t Cry’: The Ethnopragmatics of ‘Gratitude’ in West African Languages.” In Ethnopragmatics: Understanding Discourse in Cultural Context, edited by Cliff Goddard, 231–66. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2008. “He Died Old Dying to Be Dead Right: Transitivity and Semantic Shifts of ‘Die’ in Ewe in Crosslinguistic Perspective.” In Crosslinguistic Perspectives on Argument Structure: Implications for Learnability, edited by Melissa Bowerman and Penelope Brown, 231–54. New York, London: Taylor & Francis.Google Scholar
Brewer, John. 2000. Ethnography. Buckingham/ Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press.Google Scholar
Corr, Charles A., Donna M. Corr, and Kenneth J. Doka. 2019. Death and Dying, Life and Living. 8th ed. Boston, MA: Cenage.Google Scholar
Dixon, Robert M. W. 2010. Basic Linguistic Theory: Methodology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Emmons, Charles. 2003. “Ghosts: The Dead among Us.” In Handbook of Death and Dying, edited by Clifton Bryant, 11:87–95. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Farghal, Mohammed. 1995. “Euphemism in Arabic: A Gricean Interpretation.” Anthropological Linguistics 37 (3): 336–78.Google Scholar
Galal, Mohamed M. 2014. “Death Euphemism in English and Arabic: A Conceptual Metaphorization Approach.” International Journal of Linguistics 6 (1): 153–70. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Geertz, Clifford. 1973. “Thick Descriptions: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture.” In The Interpretation of Cultures, edited by Clifford Geertz, 231–67. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Gladkova, Anna. 2010. Russian Cultural Semantics: Emotions, Values, Attitudes. Moscow: Languages of Slavonic Cultures.Google Scholar
Goddard, Cliff. 2021. “In Praise of Minimal Languages.” In Minimal Languages in Action, edited by Cliff Goddard, 1–26. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Goddard, Cliff, and Anna Wierzbicka, eds. 2002. Meaning and Universal Grammar – Theory and Empirical Findings. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
, eds. 2014. Words and Meanings: Lexical Semantics across Domains, Languages and Cultures. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Habib, Sandy. 2011. Contrastive Lexical-Conceptual Analysis of Folk Religious Concepts in Arabic, Hebrew, and English: NSM Approach. Unpublished Ph.D. Thesis. Armidale: University of New England.
. 2022a. “The Ethnopragmatics of Jish Arabic-Speaking Culture.” Pragmatics and Society 13 (1): 67–84. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2022b. “On the Verge of Extinction: The Semantics, Pragmatics, and Etymology of Eight Endangered Similes in Jish Arabic.” Intercultural Pragmatics 19 (4): 513–30. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2023. “Tense-Aspect Constructions in Jish Arabic: Morphological, Syntactic, and Semantic Features.” Russian Journal of Linguistics 27 (2): 363–91. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hammersley, Martyn, and Paul Atkinson. 2007. Ethnography: Principles in Practice. 3rd ed. London, New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Hertz, Robert. 1960. Death and the Right Hand. London, New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Hidalgo, Ivette, Dorothy Brooten, JoAnne M. Youngblut, Rosa Roche, Juanjuan Li, and Ann M. Hinds. 2021. “Practices Following the Death of a Loved One Reported by Adults from 14 Countries or Cultural/Ethnic Group.” Nursing Open 8 (1): 453–62. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kamel, Abdulaziz M. 1993. A Sociolinguistic Analysis of Formulaic Expressions in Egyptian Arabic. Unpublished Ph.D. Thesis. Washington, DC: Georgetown University.
Levisen, Carsten. 2012. Cultural Semantics and Social Cognition: A Case Study on the Danish Universe of Meaning. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mel’čuk, Igor, and Alain Polguère. 2018. “Theory and Practice of Lexicographic Definition.” Journal of Cognitive Science 19 (4): 417–70. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Parkes, Colin M., Pittu Laungani, and William Young, eds. 2015. Death and Bereavement Across Cultures. London, New York: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Piamenta, Moses. 1979. Islam in Everyday Arabic Speech. Leiden: Brill. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rabab’ah, Ghaleb, and Ali M. Al-Qarni. 2012. “Euphemism in Saudi Arabic and British English.” Journal of Pragmatics 44 (6–7): 730–43. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Racy, John. 1969. “Death in an Arab Culture.” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 164 (3): 871–76. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rowling, Joanne. 2007. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
Selin, Helaine, and Robert M. Rakoff, eds. 2019. Death Across Cultures: Death and Dying in Non-Western Cultures. Singapore: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wierzbicka, Anna. 1972. Semantic Primitives. Frankfurt am Main: Athenaum.Google Scholar
. 1980. Lingua Mentalis: The Semantics of Natural Language. Sydney: Academic Press.Google Scholar
. 1985. Lexicography and Conceptual Analysis. Ann Arbor: Karoma.Google Scholar
. 2021. “‘Semantic Primitives’, Fifty Years Later.” Russian Journal of Linguistics 25 (2): 317–42. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ye, Zhengdao, ed. 2017. The Semantics of Nouns. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar